Blood and Glass
by claudiastar
Summary: A slightly dark and twisted look at some classic fairy tales- eventually a three parter. Please read and review.


Blood and Glass

Author's note: more fairy tale related ramblings. This part is, at least if I've done my job right it is, a little disturbing. but then Bluebeard is a disturbing story

Debt to Angela Carter, as always. Snow White to follow

A Marriage of Convenience.

She married him for his money.

She wonders as she sits in this room out of nightmare whether that is important somehow, whether if she had loved him she would still be here. He wasn't beautiful. He was to tall, too thin, lean and spare. His hair was such a strange colour, a smoky kind of grey that was almost blue. But he had been somehow arresting. Whenever he came into a room it was like the air became full of static, the way it does before a storm. She hadn't been able to take her eyes off him, though she found that he frightened her. He hadn't been at all in accordance with her idea of what a husband ought to be. He wasn't romantic or effusively loving, he wasn't boyishly playful, or sweetly shy. He hadn't given her gifts or told her how beautiful she was. He was forceful and determined. He knew what he wanted and refused to be denied it. She had respected that when she first met him.

But she never loved him, not even at the very beginning. Her family had fallen on hard times, there were five younger sisters who needed feeding, and he was very _very _rich. Her mother had been all in favour of the match; had pushed them together eagerly, greedily. She can hear her mothers voice in her ears now saying _Just go and _talk_ to him dear heart, laugh at his jokes a little can't you. _She thinks of that and _Shudders_. Her brother was less pleased. She remembers with startling clarity that at some overly lavish, overly long party she saw him glance over at them, just for a moment, and frown. The skin between his large brown eyes creasing tightly, casting shadows across his face. Her brother had worried.

The day he brought her to this house, this house out of nightmare, the sun shone brightly till well past nine o'clock. She thought his home was the most elegant thing she had ever seen. The ballroom alone was twice the size of the house shad grown up in with her family. It was a great eighteenth century dream of a mansion, with over a hundred rooms, fashioned out of warm honey coloured stone, and with lovely fantastical turrets, that looked ridiculously precarious, as if they couldn't possibly stay upright. Her bedroom was like something out of the fantasies of her very early childhood , back when she had believed that the world was a place full of endless possibilities, and that she herself might become a princess. There was a pink satin eiderdown on the bed, an enormous bay window through which the light streamed in the early evening, a thick dark blue carpet on the floor an on the polished mahogany dressing table- which was so clean it actually shone- there was always a vase of fresh flowers. He gave a strange wolfish grin as he showed it to her. "You like it beloved?" he asked. She had blushed in happy confusion. It was exactly what she would have chosen if she could had anything in the world. It couldn't be more different from the room she is in now- like silk contrasted with iron.

It was the gardens she loved more thank anything else. She had been frightened they would formal. She has always thought of a formal garden as an obscenity. But his gardens are beautiful, wild, full of flowers that smell sweet as well as looking perfect. There are trees everywhere- large fully grown ones, not clipped ornaments. There is a lake set at a distance from the house, a cool, still, grey, glassy body of water. She has loved it, now she her mind sticks on the thought of what might be at the bottom of it.

She supposes she should have noticed the things which were not quite right. A house like this should have a whole army of servants, but she has only ever seen three- her husbands manservant , a silent brute of a man, the cook- a stringy, beaky woman, and a young boy with a snub nose who she assumed worked in the garden or the pantry. Everything is always spotless, but it never occurred to her to ask who did the cleaning. He never once came to her bedroom, never once tried to touch her beyond an oddly cold and formal kiss on the cheek. She had been more relieved about this than anything else- the idea of anything else fills her with a sick kind of revulsion- but now it just a another thing that is wrong about him. Ought she to have guessed earlier? She thinks perhaps he brother did.

She wishes above everything else that he hadn't told her about the key. Then she might never have known, might have gone on living in blessed peaceful ignorance. But perhaps this is what he meant all along. Surely he mussed have guessed she would not be able to resist looking. The look on his face when he told her about the room, this room, behind the thirteenth door at the end of the second corridor on the right on the fourth floor, had been somehow...._hungry._ She turns it over in her hands now. It is a large heavy thing, old and covered in spots of rust (are they rust? Or are they…something else?) it feels cool to her touch, and smooth. Strange how stiff it had been in the lock, how hard she had had to work to get it to turn, how eager she had been to see, to solve mystery. Well she knows the secret now.

The door itself had been so ordinary. Small and square, made of pale polished wood, spotlessly clean like everything else in this house is. There hadn't been any warning. She had not sensed danger.

There is so much blood. Old and dried, but everywhere; up the walls, on the floor. Even the dust is red. She is worried that she will come out covered in it, marked with guilt. When she came in it was the stench that hit her first, that unmistakable smell of death but she finds she is growing accustomed to it. The blood is less easy to dismiss. It is hot in here.

She recites their names to herself, along with any details she can remember about who they were- before they were her husbands wives. Anna-Marie, who was a dancer; Lucia, whose family were old Italian Nobility;Claudine, who had been a poetess. She has seen their photographs, they were all beautiful once.

She isn't sure how long she has been her, it could be ten minutes, it feels like days. Eventually she will have to get up and leave.

The real nightmare is on the other side of the door.


End file.
